Tag Archives: continuity

Introduction

Imagine losing $100,000,000 in revenue in two days: 1/10th of a billion dollars gone in two business days. This was the reality for Delta Airlines in September of 2016, when a loss of power shut down many of their servers, causing thousands of flight delays. Everyone enjoys using the term “crash” when referring to basic program and process failures, but do not often convey the impact that crashes can have on a company. Expanding on this; companies that are not prepared with backups and continuity solutions are risking hemorrhaging resources like money and time the entire time their network is down.

“Crash” Course

One of the contributing factors to “crash” being such an overused term is that fact that a crash can be caused by many different things, and can come from both internal and external sources. A crash is, at its’ basics; an unwanted and sudden shutdown or cessation of function by a program or process. This can be cause by many different core issues, but amongst the most common would be information overload and hardware failure. Information overload is when too much information is attempted to be processed by the program or process and consequently the demand exceeds the capability of the software, causing a crash. Hardware crashes are more diverse, being caused by a variety of physical or mechanical failures that can cause the software logic to conflict with itself or trigger emergency shutdown procedures within the program itself. These can be caused by simple pre-existing conditions within the computer such as trying to run a program that has higher demands than your network can meet. However not all process and program failures stem from crashes; the recent “WannaCry” malware if present, can lock your files away, threatening their deletion for ransom, leading to a similar situation as a crash.

Why does network stability/continuity matter?

What truly makes a crash dangerous is its’ potential to “go down with the ship”. It is possible that on a computer network, if a key component or program fails and crashes, it could take the network with it; one server crashing has the capability to make a network unusable from a business perspective, costing time, and a large sum of money. As previously mentioned, in September, 2016, Delta Airlines had a physical hardware failure that caused a power outage at their Atlanta facility. Not all the servers within had backup which led to a massive data loss. This caused flights to be delayed, which meant that flight crews went overtime and had to clock out as per federal limitations, meaning flights were delayed even longer to replace flight crews, which meant passengers were in some case waiting days for their flights. Vouchers were offered to appease many of these passengers, but by time all had been said and done, Delta reported they lost over $100,000,000 in revenue all within a few days.

How can I protect my data?

The act of protecting your sensitive data from these situations is often referred to as “data continuity” or “business continuity”. The idea is that if the worst should come and your data is the victim of a crash or attack, it can be recovered quickly and effectively. There are a few ways to go about this, from keeping up-to-date backups, to having copies of your data present at off-site or off-network locations that wouldn’t be affected.